Posts Tagged ‘in practice’

When I’m asked for suggestions about how to get more clients for an online therapy practice, one of the first things the other therapist usually mentions is their membership in such-and-such online directory. It turns out that quite a few of the therapists who are struggling to find clients are already members of one or more directories, so it’s clear that not everybody who joins a directory actually winds up with many clients. Therapist directories might be a great deal, but for whom?

Provocative Therapy turns all accepted wisdom about therapy on its head. Here is a therapy in which the therapist makes fun of the client’s problems, blows them up out of all proportion and suggests crazy and surreal solutions seemingly off the top of their heads. So why does it seem to be effective?

Although research in this area is in its infancy, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is generally revealed by a recent overview to be a promising therapy in terms of clinical effectiveness.

For me the key to therapy is space: space in which to listen and to perceive in a total way everything that the client says with their words, and with their body, space in which to listen as if this person were the first and only person in the world, and they were giving you some infinitely precious information — how it is for them.

The classic response to a client’s question is to turn it back on the client, treating the question as revealing of a particular need. “I see it is really important to you to know…” This technique makes me flinch.